A device, such as a consumer edge device or user equipment like a laptop, mobile phone, or other device connecting to a communications network, may typically lease a certain bandwidth over transport network provider devices. Such a lease may define the duration an allocation of bandwidth to an edge device is valid. For example, a DHCP server may, upon receipt of a valid request, assign a DCHP-configured client an IP address, lease, and IP configuration parameters, such as a subnet mask and default gateway.
For Local Area Networks, the capacity of the bandwidth may usually match the port speed of the device. For example, a consumer device with a connection port speed of 1 Gbps (similar to the operating port speed of an exemplary Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) connection) may end up with 1 Gbps of communication speed. During regular operation, the actual bandwidth capacity, which may be the actual available capacity or “true” or “normal” available capacity, may usually match the leased bandwidth capacity (leased capacity) of the link. However, the bandwidth of the leased link may not necessarily match the port speed of the underlying infrastructure.
For example, a wireless mobile provider may lease 50 Mbps of peer-to-peer lease line over a Metro Ethernet Network (MEN) provider. (i.e. also known as Ethernet virtual line or Ethernet virtual private line) Even though the GigE port connectivity may offer a 1 Gbps capacity, the leased link may only be at 50 Mbps. In this instance, the actual available capacity over the transport provider network may vary, depending on the network load conditions, availability of links and many other factors. For example, when the transport provider network is connected through microwaves, the provider network may be capable of providing a higher bandwidth on a sunny day than during a stormy day. However, the leased bandwidth does not employ any ways to adjust properly due to such fluctuations. Traffic Engineering comes into play to inform edge devices about such changes in capacity, availability, etc.
Other proposed solutions for traffic engineering have generally required an additional protocol to handle messages. For example, Open Shortest Path First-Traffic Engineering (OSPF-TE) is a dynamic routing protocol used in IP networks that requires routing layer peering adjacencies. The protocol exchanges information using opaque link-state advertisement (LSA) carrying type-length-value (TLV) elements. However, because such traffic engineering extensions are added to the network on top of the routing protocols, such proposed solutions generally strain overall network performance and add complexity to the network.
In view of the foregoing, it would be desirable to monitor the actual available capacity of a leased link. In particular, it would be desirable to enable a device in the communications network to determine whether a leased link is operating at an actual available capacity comparable to the leased capacity of an applicable link.